I had the vertiginous pleasure of seeing Star Trek last night at the London IMAX with Mike, his wife Lin, Orbit commissioning editor Bella Pagan, and her fiance John. Aside from wishing I’d snuck in a pair of wide-angle specs to placate my protesting neck, it was more or less what I’d expected. Lots of beautiful lens-flare-y special effects and topsy-turvy camera angles draped across a threadbare silly-science plot, sort of like a Hellenistic tapestry plucked from its vertical loom and laid across a wobbling matchstick trellis.
The first few minutes were probably the very best, the editing virtually spotless, the dramatic impetus plausibly compelling, and the emotional stakes raised to harrowing heights thanks to Michael Giacchino’s Lost-like synchronicity with Abrams’s trademark quick-switch juxtaposition of apocalyptic violence against intimacy and tenderness. Pathos threat high in that narrative preamble, for sure.
But then the film starts to wobble on its tracks, eventually juddering and careening clear off in a frenzied orgasm of cataclysmic astrophysical events, zero-sum action sequences, horribly scatterbrained science, and, fatally, preposterous characterization.
The absolutely worst line in the film? “You got it.” I won’t spoil the who, when, or where, but if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I’m talking about, and probably why I’m balking, especially if you hold any stock in the redemptive (however naive) bits of Roddenberry’s original vision.
I’ll be brief — this isn’t a review, so much as an allergic reaction laid out prose-style — but I thought Chris Pine (Kirk) did what he could with a tragically shallow part, so I can’t really savage the acting so much as mourn it. Shatner’s Kirk was partially a lunkheaded cowboy, but as often a brooding, pensive, even cerebral protagonist — a worthy rival for Nimoy’s phlegmatic Spock.
Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman’s (the screenwriters) Kirk is simply a dumb, swaggering, bullying, egoistic pig without, and I mean this literally, a single redeeming intellectual or emotional value. Quinto’s Spock has every reason to hate him — he’s arguably the most dangerous (in all the wrong non-redemptive reckless ways) character in the film, every bit the clumsy, thuggish, groping villain implied by that inexplicable demonic leer in the movie posters. How he manages to eventually clamber into the captain’s chair on the bridge of the U.S.S. Apple Store (NCC 1701!) is arguably even less plausible than the fact that light (not to mention jury-rigged starships) somehow manages to escape the irrevocable pull of a singularity.
Okay, okay, rant off before I ramble for a thousand words more and burn the whole lousy reboot in effigy. I suppose they added seat-belts, and some actually pretty cool no-sound-in-space bits. Yeah, I suppose there’s that.
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